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Robotics with mBot #2

Follow-up of my previous article about my experience hosting a robotic class in a junior high school. Here is a little wrap-up of the second session.

Preparation

When I was preparing this second session, I started to write a little memo of the things I wanted to share (a mix of a recap of last session and theoretical introduction!) and some exercise ideas (and proposal of solutions). So I came up with this mini-lesson :

and this list of mini-project ideas:

I printed a dozen copies and came to the class with my stack (and some pride!). I probably dared to picture a group of 12 kids reading the document while nodding in approval and then getting on their machine to execute some of my proposals…

Execution

Of course this scenario did not happen at all! The attendees were very excited to see their little robot again (after 2 weeks break) so all they wanted to do was start tinkering with them! After 1 minute most of them were already starting to program and not paying any attention to my little speech about what are the robot “inputs” and “outputs”. So I tried to be as concise as possible and essentially gave up with a “ok, go ahead and enjoy”.

Lesson

Obviously the top-down approach I came up with was not the right one. The essence of this sort of class is to give some tools to a group and let them play, discover, assemble, dissemble etc. That’s quite demanding for the host though because everybody will react differently and answering to their unique/unexpected requests (I am trying to do X and have this problem) will be more complicated than just giving hints for a problem that was asked to the whole group.

Question

Main question I am fighting with about this all pedagogy topic is if I should hope to reach some milestone in term of knowledge or achievement where I could stop and say “ok, now we’ve understood, as a group, the concept of variables/loops/whatever”. Probably not needed.